1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic documents located in a computer network. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for simulating a dynamic link between electronic documents located in a computer network.
2. Background Information
The World Wide Web (hereinafter “Web”) is a system of communications protocols that presents information in documents that are capable of being linked to other documents. The documents are stored in a distributed manner across a computer network, such as the Internet, and are accessed using programs known as browsers.
The Web is a system of protocols exchanged between a host computer running an application, known as a server, that delivers Web documents, and a user's computer, known as the client. Web documents are created using a markup language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Generally, a markup language is a set of instructions, or markups, that is used to direct a browser how to display and manage a document. Specifically, HTML defines the format of a Web document and enables hyperlinks to be embedded in the Web document. A hyperlink is an element in an electronic document that links to another place in the same document or to an entirely different document. The address of the document to which the hyperlink points is known as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The HyperText Transfer (HTTP) Protocol is used to carry out the download of a URL-referenced resource, such as a HTML document. The technical background of the Web is described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,764,916, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
URLs used in the hyperlinks can be either static or dynamic. For static URLs, the address to which the hyperlink points is always the same. For example, the URL www.shopping.hp.com/check-out.htm always remains the same, because this is a static URL. For dynamic URLs, a different, unique session identifier is encoded in the address every time the user accesses the site. A dynamic URL would look like the following: www.shopping.hp.com/23134/check-out.htm. The number in the URL is used as a session identifier for the particular user. The session identifier is unique for each user. However, it may change even for the same user depending on the expiration period of the session identifier.
A Web application, such as a shopping cart, can include multiple Web pages, each addressed by a URL. These Web pages are accessed in a specific order. For example, the user selects an item and puts it in the shopping cart, then proceeds to check-out. Shopping cart Web applications are, for example, generated by an application server. Thus, when a user accesses the main page, all URLs pointing to other pages are generated dynamically with the session identifier embedded in the URL. From this point on, all following Web pages will contain this number until, for example, the session expires. A session identifier is typically not re-used, and a new session identifier is generated every time the user visits the Web site.
Providers of Web applications have monitored these Web applications to verify availability and performance of the applications. Usually, providers want to use a predefined transaction to verify the operation, for example, the transaction of a customer using the shopping cart. This transaction can be recorded and then continuously replayed at a specific interval. Using this recorded transaction, availability and performance measurements can be forwarded to, for example, a management system that can present the data to the provider. However, to record and playback these predefined transactions, prior solutions use a subset of these transactions in which the URLs are static.
It would be desirable to provide a system and method which can record and playback transactions having multiple, dynamic URLs.